


never say forever 'cause nothing lasts

by gealbhan



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Anxiety Attacks, Canonical Character Death, Dissociation, Episode Tag, Families of Choice, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 16:19:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19397806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gealbhan/pseuds/gealbhan
Summary: God, what do they evensay? What is there to say when a third of their team—fuck it, of theirfamily—is dead and at least another third hasn’t begun to process it, feels like she’s a helpless kid again as her body moves without her feeling it? What is there to do when the world is falling apart, more than metaphorically so, and the extended family they had once had is scattered and unaccounted for? How can they ever hope to pick up the pieces?Aubrey and Duck have a conversation. Neither is very good at grieving.





	never say forever 'cause nothing lasts

**Author's Note:**

> barely edited so i may clean this up later (i know, i know, i said that about another fic over 2 weeks ago and i've instead been working on a number of other projects), but despite being grateful for the timeskip (grief is hard to play, y'all!) i am also a bastard and wanted to write some good grief times inspired by my own unorthodox experiences with grief
> 
> warnings: canonical character death, a brief and non-graphic description of a corpse near the beginning, dissociation, and a non-graphic anxiety attack from a non-pov character
> 
> title from "doa" by foo fighters. enjoy :-)

Aubrey doesn’t cry, after. She had in the moment, more out of stress and desperation than anything, but _after_ (and God, what weight the very existence of an “after” carries), she doesn’t.

Any sort of reaction, after all, would involve processing anything related to Ned’s bloody body lying on the ground, expression more at ease than Aubrey had ever seen him, eyes unseeing and cold as they stared upward. Which she can’t even begin to think about at length. Whenever she pictures it, whenever that memory flickers through her mind, her brain cuts to static lightning-quick.

The image stays at the back of her mind for a while, though. She’s never seen a dead body as close up as that before, at least not that of someone she knew as well as Ned. Her mother’s funeral had been closed casket, and what remained of her had been cremated ( _how ironic,_ Aubrey had thought at the time—between alternating fits of crying and blank staring at the ceiling and cursing gods she didn’t believe in, anyway), so Aubrey had never seen anything beyond her ashes. Even now, some small part of her brain wants to believe that it hadn’t been a _dead_ body. That he isn’t dead. That it’d been ketchup or something spilling across his chest and the grass beneath him.

That this is all a dream, like one of Duck’s, and she’s bound to wake up any minute now. She hopes that even as she sits in the cold, dark interrogation room, digging her fingers into her palms and creating crescent grooves in her skin that sting when she lifts her nails and answering “I don’t know, I don’t know” over and over because she doesn’t know what to do. Except she’s trying not to cling too tightly to that hope, given Duck’s dreams usually come true. Aubrey doesn’t want it to be true.

The last conversation she’d had with Ned rings through her head. She hadn’t planned to remember every word then, so she doesn’t now, but she remembers the gist of it. The _feeling_ of it, of finally calling the conman out, of catching him in the act with her mother’s necklace, of releasing all the rage and hurt she had felt in that moment, of getting the truth out of a man who had lied most of his life.

Now, she doesn’t feel any of that. She doesn’t feel _anything_. She doesn’t even wish that their last conversation had been different, that she hadn’t told Ned to leave and that she hated him the last time she’d seen him alive. She regrets it, but… she doesn’t wish for it to be different. Doesn’t magic into existence a reality where Ned, even a still-deceased Ned, and Aubrey threw dick jokes at each other the last time they talked, no matter how much the thought makes her want to laugh.

She’d learned her lesson about wishing for things to be different and changing the past when her mother died. It can’t be done, and so there’s no use wasting time and energy thinking about it—even less use blaming herself in this situation, because she hadn’t even been there (or maybe that means there’s even more reason to blame herself, because she _hadn’t been there_ ). There’s nothing anyone can do about the way things shake out sometimes. That’s life: things happen the way they do, and it can suck, but it’s still always going to be that way.

Aubrey presses her tongue against her cheek and lifts her gaze to meet the FBI agent across from her’s eyes. They look taken aback, but someone must say something through their fancy comms unit, because they turn away and hold their ear and mutter something back.

Something happens between then and the time Aubrey is walking out of the building with a “You’re free to go, miss” from the FBI agent that sounds more ominous than it should, but she doesn’t know what it is. She barely remembers anything that’s happened in the past… however long it’s been since she was brought in for interrogation. Hours? Days? Aubrey doesn’t know. She doesn’t think she’s going to find out for some time, either.

She’s still not crying. She feels numb, detached, like that static inside her mind is spreading to the rest of her body. Like she’s a passenger in her own body, consciousness trapped somewhere in her chest as she moves. It makes her almost walk right into Duck, who’s standing outside the building and looking like a loiterer or someone hoping to bum a smoke. He also looks a little high.

Aubrey backs up, laughing—which sounds fake to her own ears—and blinking, as he turns to look at her, eyes wide but swollen and red around the edges, which doesn’t help the _high_ thing. She can only hope the FBI agents don’t demand they come back in now. “Sorry, Duck,” she says, raising her hands. “I, uh, didn’t see you there.”

“Yeah, I, uh—I get it.” Duck shoves his hands into his pockets. His eyes dart every which way as he rocks up and down on his toes, seeming to know as little about what to say or do as Aubrey.

God, what do they even _say_? What is there to say when a third of their team—fuck it, of their _family_ —is dead and at least another third hasn’t begun to process it, feels like she’s a helpless kid again as her body moves without her feeling it? What is there to do when the world is falling apart, more than metaphorically so, and the extended family they had once had is scattered and unaccounted for? How can they ever hope to pick up the pieces?

Sudden nausea washes over Aubrey. _Too_ sudden, like she should have felt it ages ago. She swallows down the rush of bile in her throat. She hasn’t eaten in God knows how long, so she doesn’t even know what would come up, but she does know that it wouldn’t be good.

She drags her hand across her mouth and straightens. “How are you doing?”

“Tired,” is Duck’s immediate response. It shows, Aubrey notices but keeps herself from pointing out, in his slouch and the dark circles that have deepened beneath the red rims of his eyes. He sighs and fidgets with a slap bracelet Aubrey recognizes as his belt-slash-sword. “I wanna go back home and take a fucking nap so bad, but I don’t think things here are quite over yet.”

“Yeah.” Aubrey leans against the wall beside him. Though she feels like she should be exhausted, she isn’t. Isn’t _allowed_ to be yet, not until this is all over, a voice deep within her says, but she doesn’t believe that—there’s no moratorium on her own feelings, at least not one that’s been consciously imposed. “You heard about…?”

She trails off, but she doesn’t have to elaborate. Duck’s jaw tenses as tears form at the corners of his eyes. And now that she looks, Aubrey can make out dry tear tracks along his cheeks. Oh no, she thinks, and immediately feels guilty for it.

“I think the whole damn town has by now,” says Duck, low, a muscle in his jaw moving. “I was thinking about heading over to the Cryptonomica later. Just, y’know, see how it fared. What’s left behind.”

By the way he says it, Aubrey can tell he already knows what’s really been left behind—not gold or creatures created of mashed-together taxidermied animal parts or stolen family heirlooms. It’d be hard not to realize, given they’re standing right here, weighed down by what’s gone.

Aubrey manages a smile. It’s weary and one of the weakest she’s worn in her entire life, but it’s a smile nonetheless. “That sounds good. We could clean up over there. Help Kirby out.”

“Ah, yeah, he’s gonna take it over, isn’t he.” Duck’s voice breaks on the last word. The tears in his eyes spill over, and he—maybe picking up on the tensing of Aubrey’s stance, maybe just uncomfortable—hurries to wipe them away as they fall. He sucks in a ragged breath as his rapid eye-wiping does little to get rid of the tears still leaking down his cheeks, and then another, and—

“You’re going to suffocate if you breathe like that,” says Aubrey. Duck gives her a look as if to say _I fucking know that_ , though it loses some of its effectiveness with the general wet state of his face. “C’mon, uh, what’s that one breathing exercise—”

“Breathe in for—for a count of four,” chokes out Duck, shutting his eyes and dropping his hands. “Hold, seven. Exhale and—and eight.”

“‘Kay, so—so do that, okay? Everything will be okay, Duck. Everything will be just fine.”

Aubrey hovers there, feeling awkward and out of her depth despite the fact that she’s helped people out of crying and panic attacks plenty of times before and had loads of firsthand experience with them. As Duck slows his breathing and, with it, his crying, she takes the time to ground herself.

Her name is Aubrey Little, she reminds herself, holding her pendant so hard her fingers throb. She is a magician. Her stage name is the Lady Flame. She is standing outside of a building that has been, near as she can tell, taken over as a temporary FBI HQ. She has a rabbit named Dr. Harris Bonkers, and he has a Ph.D., and he is her closest companion.

 _Everything will be okay, Aubrey._ She doesn’t know if she believes it any more than when she’d told Duck.

She breathes, and she brings herself back, though she still feels a little distant, like some part of her has been severed. Silence hangs over them for a few moments. Aubrey looks at her shoes. She doesn’t know what Duck looks at.

“I don’t think we’ve got time to do a proper funeral,” says Duck eventually, voice raw and broken. “It’s what he deserves, but we’ve gotta fucking—” He shakes his head, maybe to cut himself off or express his discontent with the current SNAFU re Kepler and Sylvain and the feds and, shit, everything, now that Aubrey lets herself think about it. “Everything’s gone to shit, Aubrey, so we don’t even get to pay our respects to a man who was brave as hell right to the end.”

“We’ll throw him the best funeral Kepler’s ever seen, I promise.” Aubrey’s voice does not shake. “And we can all give eulogies about how he stole an Oscar from Clooney once, and all the other shit he took from famous and rich people who probably deserved it, ‘cause we’ll only invite people who already know about his technically illegal habits or plain don’t care, and…” She trails off, and because her brain-to-mouth filter isn’t always the best, she hears herself blurt: “On the night my mom died, he robbed my house.”

Duck stares. Aubrey stares back, not having enough energy to swallow her words back or apologize. For speaking ill of the dead, for speaking ill of Aubrey and Duck’s best goddamn friend, for oversharing, for whatever is happening to her right now because she’s pretty sure this isn’t how grief is supposed to work. _Everyone grieves differently,_ her old therapist’s voice soothes at the back of her mind. Aubrey tries to ignore it.

“What the fuck?” says Duck. “He—he _robbed you_?”

“My mom and dad, technically,” says Aubrey, mouth twitching. “It was the day before I was supposed to leave to become the Lady Flame.” Her argument with Ned, or at least the barest bones of it, flickers through her mind, and Aubrey shrinks into herself, folding her arms. She feels like she should be crying. This feels like a good crying moment. She’s still not. She wants to cry, tries to force it, but her eyes remain stubbornly dry. The numbness crawling all over her shapeshifts into more of a buzzing sensation. “I—I don’t want to talk about it.”

Duck opens and then shuts his mouth. He rubs the back of his neck, taking the hint and looking at his shoes instead of Aubrey. “All right. Just… shit, Aubrey.”

It’s not funny, not at all, but Aubrey laughs. “Yeah. Yeah, ‘just shit’ is right.”

She’s about to say something more about Ned, but then she remembers: _I told him to leave. I told him I hated him. I told him I told him I told him—_

Aubrey curls her hands into fists as her legs tremble, threatening to give out beneath her. She takes a deep breath in the same pattern Duck had mentioned. She inhales: _One-two-three-four_. She holds her breath: _One-two-three-four-five-six-seven._ She exhales: _One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight._ She rinses and repeats, and slowly but surely, she comes back to herself for real, and Duck lets her, silent but gaze lingering on her.

And then Aubrey and Duck glance at each other out of the corners of their eyes. And really, what else is there to do now—even though not all has been said and done, even though the battle may be over and won (as hollow a victory as it seems now) but the war is far from done, even though the dirty laundry is still wet and flapping in the wind—but hug things out?

So, without a word, they wrap their arms around each other and hold onto the family they’ve got left with all they’ve got.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! if you have time to spare, comments and kudos are very much appreciated <3
> 
> [tumblr](https://infernallegaycy.tumblr.com) | [twitter](https://twitter.com/birdmarrow)


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